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Startup Billionaires: The Numbers Behind Their Success

Startup Billionaires: The Numbers Behind Their Success

Tech startup companies have long been a source of millionaire founders and employees. In more recent years, there have been tech billionaires out of the IPO starting gate for dotcom companies.

Tech Billionaires

In Forbes (worldwide) Billionaires list, in the top 500 positions (#1-490, due to tied positions), the U.S. had 167 billionaires (those who are American citizens) or about 33%.

In Forbes’ Mar 2013 Billionaires list, the United States has 167 citizens in the top 500 positions (ranking #1-490, due to ties). So about 33% of the top 500 billionaires are Americans. An even smaller number are tech startups. Here are the number of billionaires by company for a selection of recent or one-time tech startups — from the Forbes top 500:

Ranking #s above are from the full worldwide Billionaires list, with net worth calculated by Forbes in Mar 2013.

Microsoft and Oracle haven’t been startups in decades, but are included for reference.

There are additional American “tech” billionaires in the full Forbes list from previous decades.

There are 4 additional billionaires associated with Facebook: Eduardo Saverin (rank #670, $2.2B); Sean Parker (rank #736, $2B: fortune from other sources as well); Peter Thiel, Facebook’s first outside investor, ranked #931 ($1.6B – part of which may be from his stake in co-founding PayPal); Jim Breyer, another investor, was ranked #1175 ($1.2B – part of which is his from his venture capital investments elsewhere).

According to the Forbes Billionaires list, there were 1426 people listed in total.

29 of the 1426 people (about 2%) were under 40 at the time.

10 of the 29 are in technology, which includes 4 from Facebook alone.

11 of the 29 are Americans.

5 of the 29 are first-time billionaires.

Google vs Facebook vs Twitter

Facebook and Twitter are two of the more notable recent tech startups to go public, with Google going public nearly 10 years previous. Here are some numbers on the collective wealth of these companies.

Google

Google started trading on Aug 19, 2004, with an IPO share price of $85, but opened at $100.

Estimates suggested that upon the IPO, at least 1,000 Google employees would become millionaires on paper. Further estimates suggest more than 1,000 employees have since become millionaires.

YouTube, which was purchased on Nov 13, 2006 by Google for $1.65B, made its founders millionaires, along with a few other employees, at least on paper, since the deal was all-stock only.

Co-founder Chad Hurley’s stake was estimated to have been worth $345.6M (694,087 Google shares, plus 41,232 shares in trust), based on a market price on of $470.01 on the day of Google’s SEC filing (Feb 7, 2007).

Twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss won a settlement against Facebook that made their collective ownership worth about $225M based on the IPO price.

Graffiiti artist David Choe got shares worth at least $200M (as of May 16, 2012), just for painting murals at Facebook’s headquarters.

Estimates suggest about 1,000 Facebook employees became millionaires on paper the day the company went public (subject to the whim of the market, given the company’s transient share price).

Twitter’s New Millionaires

What the Forbes list does not include is the new fortunes of Twitter billionaires, after the company’s IPO on Nov 7, 2013. Well, just one. While several people and investing companies became multimillionaires, only one person became a billionaire: